Interview with Jack Smith
In 1967, the Montreal development firm Maxwell Cummings and Sons planned three office projects in Calgary: Calgary Place, Pacific 66 Plaza, and the Royal Bank Building. The projects were led by Robert M. Cummings (1921–2009), who hired Dan Kiley and Partners of Charlotte, Vermont to do the designs. Kiley (1912–2004) assigned the projects to partner Jack Smith, who completed the work. In 1968, as a token of gratitude for the hospitality he received in Calgary, Cummings donated the Family of Man statues that still stand outside the CBE Building.
Dr Jack R. Smith, Arch.D., FAIA, NCARB, was born in Utah in 1932 and worked with Dan Kiley from 1967 to 1971. He now lives in Sun Valley, where he continues to practise. On 4 July 2021 we met to talk about his work in Calgary in the late 1960s. The following text is based on that convesation. For more information on his work, see jacksmitharchitect.com.
Calgary Modern.com: (CM) Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed by Calgary Modern. We are interested in your comments since we found in our research that you were the design architect for several modern buildings in the central core of Calgary in the late 1960s. We think these buildings were significant in the formation and modern character of the office buildings of that period.
Jack Smith: (JS) I am very pleased that you contacted me and that you recognized my designs. It seems so long ago, I thought people had forgotten now that so many higher buildings have been built since then.
CM: We would like to know more about you, your background, and what brought you to Calgary. When did you first come to Calgary?
JS: I spent my honeymoon in Calgary, Banff, and Lake Louise in 1951. That was my first trip to Canada. My late wife Sue and I were skiers and we hiked to the Athabasca Glacier above Lake Louise and had a great time. We stayed at the Banff Springs Hotel and the Chateau Lake Louise.
CM: Could you talk a bit about your personal background?
JS: I was born in Provo, Utah, which was then a small town 40 miles south of Salt Lake City. I was born in 1932 in the middle of the depression. My family moved to Salt Lake City when I was about a year and a half old and that’s where I grew up. I lived there until 1967 when I left to join Dan Kiley in Vermont. I’m a skier and have been a skier for most of my life – I started at the age of three. The mountains have always been important to me.
I went to the University of Utah. It wasn’t Harvard, but in those days the school of architecture was ranked 18th in the nation. I think the important things about the school for me were the people who taught there or visited the school. When I was very young, a freshman, I met Frank Lloyd Wright at school. Only about 20-or-so students and I were sitting around with him asking questions and having conversations with him. It was extraordinary. People like Buckminster Fuller, Richard Neutra, and Ray and Charles Eames came to the school to lecture…all the big names in those days came. It was really an important thing for me to meet and learn from people of that caliber.
I entered college in 1949. In those days about half the faculty in architecture were from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in France and were classicists. The other half were modernists and Bauhaus people. So, I had a mix of classicism and modernism. It was very stimulating. I think that was a very important part of my early education.
I was a Beta, and a lot of my fraternity brothers were in English literature, so I read a lot. On the entrance exam to get into college I did well in the humanities but not so well in science and mathematics. In architecture I had to overcome that obstacle. I now have a strong interest in engineering. I’ve always been interested in philosophy and art.
CM: Were you an artist before you went into architecture?
JS: I enjoyed drawing. I think basically I was very oriented to aesthetics.
CM: How did you get interested in architecture?
JS: My interest came about because my uncle was a general contractor. He was a kind of jack of all trades… he could do anything. I worked for him in the summers, starting when I was about nine straightening nails. In the war years new nails were hard to get. Working for my uncle Ben brought me into that world of building. He was very generous in his interest in teaching me how to frame a building…teaching me about the names of building elements, studs, joist, rafters, and the like. His son Max was a designer. He encouraged me to read about architecture. I read most all of Frank Lloyd Wright’s writings before I entered college.
I think another influence was when I saw in Life Magazine an article that had a Zen master calligrapher sitting in a tea house in a Japanese garden. I’d never seen anything like that before, being brought up in Salt Lake. I was stunned by its beauty. I’ve been interested in Japanese architecture, Japanese philosophy, and the Japanese influence since then. I went back to school when I was in my late 60s to get a doctorate in architecture. Since I was already an architect, I spent most of my tine in the philosophy department. I studied east-west comparative philosophy and spent some time in Japan. I wrote my dissertation on Shinto and its influence on the modern architecture of the early 20th century.
CM: We noted in our research that you have been a teacher as well as a practitioner. Please tell us about your teaching experience.
JS: I started teaching in 1964, quite early in my career. I left school before graduating due to financial and family pressures, and yet I was asked to come back and teach. Being asked to teach without a degree and before licensure is quite unusual in the academic world. I’m not sure of all the reasons, but I think the Dean was aware of my passion for architecture and my relationship with John Sugden. I had started working as an apprentice for John in 1953. Meeting John came through skiing. He was a Mies van der Rohe protégé. He was also in the 10thMountain Division, which was a skiing and mountaineering division in World War II. He saw action in Italy and got the Silver Star. Dev Jennings, one of my ski coaches, introduced me to John. Working for John was almost like working for Mies, it was incredible. He took me to Mies’s office a few times in Chicago. It is important to note that Mies was and is recognized as the most important architect of the 20th century.
CM: Did you meet Mies?
JS: I went to his office a few times with Sugden, but he was never there! I met everybody else in his office, but I missed him every time. I never did shake his hand.
CM: Tell us about your relationship with Dan Kiley.
JS: I met Dan in 1964 at the University of Utah where I was teaching half-time. He came to lecture there on landscape architecture and its relationship to architecture and the natural environment. His respect for the environment was Buddhist like. I was surprised that landscape architecture involved large scale land-use studies, not just garden design. His knowledge of architecture was also most impressive to me. Like Mies, Dan was a modernist, and interestingly like Mies, Dan is recognized as the most important landscape architect of the 20th century.
Dan returned to our school to lecture the following year. At that time, I had been asked by my skiing friend Ted Jonson, to work with him on the early concepts and designs for a new ski area near Alta, Utah. Knowing the large scope of what was later to be called Snowbird, I was aware of my need for assistance from a seasoned professional, so I asked Dan to go skiing with me. He was delighted and had brought his skis with him from Vermont hoping to ski at Alta. Dan was an excellent east coast skier. We skied together that day and I showed him the area and discussed my involvement with Snowbird. Dan made several suggestions on my planning approach, the most important was the suggestion of a skier’s bridge to a central plaza. This was later to be the key idea in the planning of the resort. That day of skiing led to a professional and personal relationship with Dan until his death in 2004.
Since Snowbird was not yet funded, Dan invited me to work for him, which was astonishing since he was a world-famous landscape architect. I jumped at the chance. He moved us from Salt Lake City to Vermont in 1967 with my wife and three kids and found us a place to live.
I was suddenly involved with Dan in an international practice. Our clients were people like Eero Saarinen, Kevin Roche, and I. M. Pei… many of the major architects of that time. Dan was a landscape architect. I was trained as an architect but interested in environmental issues as well. My first project with Dan was for Lawrence Rockefeller, who sponsored a 10,000 square mile environmental study in Vermont. I made the presentation to First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, Stewart Udall, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Rockefeller, and Governor and Mrs. Philip Hoff…a formidable experience.
I stayed with Dan Kiley and Partners until Snowbird was funded. With Dan’s encouragement I returned to Salt Lake to complete my work on Snowbird and start my own firm, Enteleki.
During my tenure with Dan from 1967 to 1971, I was involved in many projects, most of which were oriented to landscape design, campus planning and environmental studies. Being the only architect in the firm, I was anxious to do some design work in architecture. The opportunity came when Bob Cummings came to our office.
CM: What brought Bob Cummings to Kiley’s office and who was he?
JS: Bob and Jack Cummings were the sons of Maxwell Cummings. Maxwell Cummings and Sons, or Cummings Properties, was a real estate holding company located in Montreal. They developed and owned commercial properties across Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver.
CM: How did Bob Cummings find Kiley? It seems a bit odd coming from Montreal to hire a Vermont firm.
JS: Cummings had an idea of developing Sir Winston Churchill Square, the central square in Edmonton, into a park with an underground shopping center. Because it was a park, it involved landscape architecture. Dan had just finished Oakland Museum, which is a non-building… basically a museum under a garden in Oakland. I think this led to Cummings seeking Dan out to do a similar project to that in Oakland.
I was assigned, as partner in charge, to that project because it was partly architectural. We designed a dome at the center and put the shopping down below. That project never went ahead. It didn’t get funding or something, but we did a preliminary design for it.
CM: How and why then did the architectural projects in Calgary come about since they were primarily architectural and not landscape architecture?
After the Edmonton project fell through, we didn’t hear from Cummings until we got a call asking if we were interested in doing some work in Calgary for them. They had engaged in developing an office complex for Mobil Oil. Abugov and Sunderlund were architects from Calgary. They had presented a design for the Mobil Oil Building to the representatives of Mobil Oil Corporation, their consulting architect, Eliot Noyes, and Cummings Properties. Eliot Noyes, a well-known architect from Harvard, was the consulting architect for Mobil Oil, IBM, and other large corporations. He did not approve of the work that Abugov and Sunderlund had done. He felt that it did not come up to the design standards he had established for Mobil Oil and their image. I’m guessing here, but I think Dan and Elliot may have known each other at Harvard. I am sure however that Elliot knew of Dan’s reputation. Cummings mentioned our work with them in Edmonton and my being the design architect in Dan’s firm. We were subsequently asked to completely rethink the design for what would become Calgary Place. For me it was a dream come true. Our designs were well received, and we were asked to be the “Design Architects” for the project. I must admit to a bit of friction, during the course of the work, between Abugov and Sunderland and me, due to the imposition of our designs, and their being subordinated to production architects.
CM: Was it just a single tower at this point?
JS: It was just a single tower for Mobil Oil to start, but it very quickly grew into the whole complex which included the Superior Oil tower, the Toronto Dominion Bank, and a shopping center with parking below…a full block which also connected to the Calgary Inn with a pedestrian bridge. I think the bridge, called the plus fifteen pedestrian system, may have been the first, or one of the first, in that system for the downtown core of Calgary. Cummings also went into partnership on Calgary Place with the general contractor, Sam Hashman. Sam wasn’t much involved in the design, but that being said, he and Cummings did hire an amazingly good engineering firm, Read Jones Christoffersen, from Vancouver. I worked with Per Christoffersen (1924–2003) on all the projects in Calgary. He was a great engineer.
CM: Did you do the designs alone?
JS: No, I was the design architect, but other people in our office, the contractors, and the engineers, were very much involved. The construction methods and structural engineering were very important in the design process. Concrete framing was chosen for all the buildings. 31 storeys in 1967 was considered very high in concrete. The method of constructing concrete buildings was important too. We used a system called flying forms. This method is similar to stage forming, but the forms are pulled and “flown” with a crane to the next floor level which is faster and more efficient time and labor wise than stage forming. This was an important part of the process. The buildings turned out to be very cost efficient.
CM: What style were you working in?
JS: I would say modern, but I don’t like the term style or “International Style.” Modernity isn’t a style: it’s a way of thinking or an idea. Modernity isn’t a point in time, it’s a state of mind. I see modernism as a lineal continuation of a rational approach to design and living. Mies said, "There is style in architecture, but architecture is not style."
CM: Could you talk about the corner windows on Calgary Place?
JS: You raise an interesting question here. Classical architecture plays a role in this discussion. Turning the corner in a building has been an aesthetic and functional issue from very early tines including the Parthenon. This discussion would be more fitting in a lecture, but to simplify it, how the corner is handled relates to the module and bay system. A bay is the space between principal columns and a module is the division between the bay. In the buildings in Calgary Place the bay was thirty feet by thirty feet and the module was five feet. The thirty-foot bay was based on an efficient parking layout below the buildings and an efficient structural span in a concrete floor system. If you layout the geometry for this, in- order to keep the five-foot module even on all facades for an efficient window and office layout, the corner needs to accommodate that geometry, hence the corner window and spaced mullions. If you do not have similar or the same facades as you turn the corner like the Royal Bank building, then the corner is very different. There is also a cadence set up by the five-foot module which establishes a certain scale to the façade which is an aesthetic issue. Music is similar in that the cadence or module is measured in time. In architecture it is measured in space.
CM: Could you tell us a bit about the bridge design that connects to the Calgary Inn across the street?
JS: Yes, as I mentioned, the bridge was one of the first, if not the first, to establish the plus-fifteen pedestrian system in the core of Calgary. Given the extreme cold temperatures Calgary can get in winter, a warmed circulation system above traffic was a good idea. It also gave rise to an additional floor or mezzanine for added commercial area. The bridge was one of my favorite projects in that it is a steel frame. It gave me the opportunity to detail steel in a way that I was taught in the Miesian tradition. There are no gusset plates at the connections which would be normal in say a railroad bridge. It’s a pure Pratt truss and each steel member is expressed and has its own structural and aesthetic integrity. You might note how the lower beams or purlins hang from the lower chord. I am very proud of it.
CM: After Calgary Place, what was your next project and when did it occur?
JS: The next project was Pacific 66 on sixth and sixth. We received the commission very shortly after Calgary Place. The local architects of record, with whom we worked, were Stevenson, Raines, Barrett, Hutton, and Seaton. They were very professional and easy to work with. The structural engineers were Read, Jones, Christoffersen. Working again with Per Christoffersen was a real pleasure. The design came about principally because we precast the concrete facade. That building, by the way, was the least expensive of all of them. We designed a precast facade system; the aesthetics were my department, but the engineering was very much a part of the design. The bays were 30 feet wide by 10 or 12 feet high and were precast as a single unit. They were hoisted up with a crane and bolted to the concrete structural frame. This process saved considerable time in labor. You may note the way this building turns the corner is different than the Calgary Place buildings. The mullions are part of the aesthetic cadence, but they also encase the windows and are grooved to accommodate the widow washing equipment.
CM: Please tell us about the Royal Bank Building.
JS: The most Miesian of the buildings is the Royal Bank. Hyman Tolchinsky was the architect of record on the Royal Bank Building. Working with Hy was more of a collaboration than on the other buildings. He was from Montreal and a delight to work with. We got on well both professionally and personally. Having been trained at McGill University, he had a strong design sense as well as technical expertise. Coupled with Per Christoffersen, our joint efforts were very innovative structurally and in the plan diagram. Since the parking structure was at the side of the building rather than below, we were free to use a different bay system. It was a 30-foot bay but with a 15-foot cantilever on each side which allows the façade to be free of any columns. That’s why that façade is so clean.
By putting the core off the plate, which contains the elevators and a unique stairway, the floor plate remains completely open allowing for a full floor occupancy with no interruptions, with the exception of the columns.
CM: Could you talk about the pink mirrored glass in the Royal Bank?
JS: Since we were now commissioned to do four multi-story buildings, and in office buildings large areas of glass are required to provide natural lighting and reduced artificial lighting loads, we needed to know as much as possible about new technologies in glass. The Cummings people were aware of this need. It was important to them relative to the operating costs of the buildings. In glass there is a term called shading coefficient which has to do with the amount of solar gain that is let into the building. The better the shading coefficient the less capital costs and operating costs for air conditioning. I was asked to research glass produced in America, like LOF and Pittsburgh Plate, and also glass produced in Europe. I visited Pilkington in England and Glaverbel in Belgium. The Glaverbel glass had by far the best shading coefficient due to its reflective quality. The gold or pink color was an integral part of the reflective quality of the glass. The trip to Belgium was my first trip to Europe. It was greatly enhanced by the generosity of the Cummings people. They paid for all expenses, not only to London and Brussels, but to other cities in Europe including Paris, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. They hired Luke van Hennigan, a well traveled glass consultant, to guide us through Europe. It was a great experience.
CM: Were you at the openings for Calgary Place or Pacific 66?
JS: I don’t remember being invited to any grand openings. That may have had to do with the sensitive socio-political relationship we had, perhaps the imposition of an American architect on the local architects in Canada. It’s just a guess.
CM: Were you involved with the Family of Man statues?
JS: No, I visited Expo 67 in Montreal, and saw the statues at the British Pavilion, but I was not involved. I would have been proud to have been, however.
CM: The three buildings are quite distinct from one another. What were some of the inspirations behind the designs?
JS: Even though the sites are urban, they still have certain characteristics that are distinct form one another. Some required parking underneath the tower, others not. We explored different structural systems in each. The building forms come from structural innovation as well as from the site diagrams. I think the inspiration was simply trying to stay true to honest design principles.
CM: Was there anything about the Calgary context or landscape that influenced the designs?
JS: Not so much. If I had been working in Lake Louise or Banff, there would have been a strong natural influence from that mountainous region, but in Calgary the context is urban, so the diagrams of the circulation systems, both horizontal and vertical, were a more driving force in the designs.
CM: Could you talk about the colour choices on the three buildings? The golden brown of Calgary Place is very distinct and I don’t think at the time there was anything else in the skyline with that colouration.
JS: When I was at the University of Utah, I taught colour. One of the reasons I got my job there was that I knew something about Josef Albers, who was a Bauhaus colourist. The colour and texture on the buildings at Calgary Place were a result of having to spray sand on the structural concrete frame, since architectural concrete in those days was difficult to achieve. Local sand was sprayed on the structural concrete frame using epoxy as a binder or glue. The sand is an aggregate from Calgary, so it’s a local and natural colour. The colour and texture then are simply an honest expression of the use of local materials.
On Pacific 66, the concrete façade was precast concrete, meaning that the concrete was poured into a steel form. It is very easy to control the colour and texture in precast concrete since it is done in laboratory or shop conditions, not field conditions. After the large sections were hoisted up on to the building frame, we steam cleaned it to remove any blemishes from the construction process. The steam cleaning made the concrete quite white. Again, this was a natural and honest process. I was very pleased with the result.
Royal Bank is different. The principal façades are mostly glass encased in aluminum mullions which were powder coated black. These façades are very Miesian. The end facades have no glass and are faced with grey precast concrete panels. The entry is on the end of the building using two columns or piers covered in Roman travertine marble. The warm grey concrete, and honey coloured travertine, played against the black mullions and gold glass, come together in a pleasing and elegant way. I remember being in Calgary one morning when the building was just finished, and on the radio, the announcer said, “the Royal Bank is smiling at us this morning.” I thought that was lovely. It is tragic however, that the entry has now been so severely compromised.
CM: At Calgary Place, did you do the rooftop garden above the bank, or was that Dan?
JS: We did it together. Dan’s idea was to make it geometric. The order was based on the 30-foot bay and five-foot module. The heavier loads were the trees, which were placed above the columns at 30 feet on center. Peter Walker and Ian Tyndall, other partners in the firm were also involved. The street tree bases on the sidewalk that separate the pedestrians from the automobile traffic were also a collaboration within our office. I understand they have now been removed, not sure why.
CM: Were there interior people at the firm who did the lobbies?
JS: I designed the lobbies in Calgary Place and Pacific 66. We did not have interior designers in our firm. We architects try to set the design philosophy for the interiors for others to follow, or do them ourselves. Except for the insistence on using travertine marble and keeping the interiors consistent with the entry, the interiors of the Royal Bank were done in collaboration with the RBC designers. One of them travelled with us to Europe when we went to study glass.
CM: Have you been back to Calgary?
JS: The last time I was in Calgary was probably in 1975. I would like to go back to see how the buildings are holding up. If I do go back, I am sure I will be extremely disappointed by what has been done to the entry of the Royal Bank.
CM: After you finished the three buildings in 1970, how much longer did you stay with Kiley?
JS: I left shortly after because of Snowbird. I went back to Salt Lake City in about 1971. Kiley and I stayed friends and I worked with him on a couple of other projects, but independently. We did a study in Spain for the ski resort Sol y Nieve. Sometimes I wonder whether I should have stayed with Dan and gone to France to work on La Défense, but Snowbird was important too.
CM: Did you ever do another office tower?
JS: There was another project that Cummings wanted to do. It was in Montreal for the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), which was an agency of the United Nations. The Cummings people obtained a beautiful site near McGill. They wanted to do a tower like the UN. They asked me to do it with Kiley. We dd some preliminary design work and built a model which we presented to the agency, but I think the agency didn’t get funding or political support, I’m not sure. Anyway, the building didn’t go through, and I was quite disappointed that it didn’t. It would have been quite extraordinary, working on that international scale.
I was also involved in another office building in San Francisco I called the fresh air building on Kearney Street. Bill Pereira, the architect for the Trans-America Pyramid building, was the principal architect for it. My concept was that the windows should open allowing for natural ventilation. In San Francisco there are often three days of fog and then three days of sun. Pereira did the actual design.
CM: Do you have the original drawings for the Calgary buildings?
JS: No, I don’t have them. What’s tragic is that Kiley, just before he died, was going to sell his archive to Harvard for I think $3 million. He assembled everything in his barn, and lightening hit the barn and it burned to the ground. They are gone.
CM: Do you have a favourite of the buildings in Calgary?
JS: Good question. I would say Royal Bank, had it been left alone. Pacific 66 is important in its simplicity. It makes a lot of sense. Calgary Place still stands proud in its own way, and I love the bridge. They’re all different. They’re not different because I tried to be different: they’re different because of their need to be different. Le Corbusier said, “it’s very easy to be different, but very hard to be good.” I try to be good.
CM: After all these years, how do you feel about working in Canada and what you accomplished there?
JS: I am proud of my work there and I enjoyed my experiences in Canada very much. It’s a wonderful nation. I still stand when I hear O Canada. Working with the Cummings people and Per Christoffersen was a pure delight. I’d like to go back and do it again.